Archive for Nov 29, 2011

GM has worked long and hard to bring the Volt to market and the car is now facing its biggest challenge with several fires erupting after crash tests. The car was originally unveiled back in 2007 and then it took longer than GM had hoped to get the car onto the market for consumers to buy. The Volt has hit a few speed bumps along the way, but the cars have been selling and are nice options for the green fans that want an EV but don’t want to worry about how far they can drive. The Volt can go 40 miles on battery power alone and has a range of 379 miles with the gasoline generator.

One of the tricks that some analysts are saying AT&T might be able to use to revive its dying deal to purchase T-Mobile is to agree to sell off more of the T-Mobile assets to other carriers. The catch is that the sell off would need to be made to a smaller carrier according to some rather than to Verizon. AT&T has apparently decided to try that tactic.

RIM will attempt to corner the enterprise smartphone and tablet management market in early 2012, the company has revealed, pushing its security ecosystem even when users have defected to iPhone and Android. BlackBerry Mobile Fusion will kick off in closed beta in January 2012, with general availability expected in March, offering enterprise users remote configuration, locking, secure wiping and connectivity management whether they're using a BlackBerry phone, PlayBook, Android smartphone or tablet, or an iPhone or iPad.

Nintendo has delayed its 3DS update, set to bring 3D video recording and more to the dual-display handheld gaming console before the end of November, though the new functionality will still arrive in time for the holidays. According to Nintendo, the 3DS system update will now drop on December 8, with the "final stages of internal testing" blamed for the delay.

Apple's home entertainment hobby, the Apple TV, is readying a leap to its third-generation of hardware according to details spotted in yesterday's iOS 5.1 developer beta. The new model is believed to have the J33 codename, 9 to 5 Mac reports, a step up from a more general identifier number, and signaling that a commercial launch could be close at hand.

Lenovo has launched a trio of new tablets, including a 5-inch LePad/IdeaTab S2005 tablet/phone hybrid, and 7-inch and 10.1-inch slates to sate your browsing the multimedia needs. The LePad S2007 and S2010 will hit China in December, Engadget Chinese reports, running a 1.5GHz Qualcomm dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM and a 1280 x 800 IPS display; however, Lenovo also apparently has a separate Tegra 3 tablet, the IdeaTab K2 leaked earlier this month, for the international market.

Google has just announced that its bringing back games to the Android Market in South Korea. The decision follows Apple's re-introduction of iOS platform games earlier this mont,h and comes because South Korea has changed its policy regarding mobile applications. Until recently, the South Korean government required that all games be appraised and audited by the "Game Rating Board," a stringent demand that quickly prompted companies Apple and Google to remove their entire games category from their respective app stores.

What's up, fellow Americans. We've officially taken the early lead in LTE (Long Term Evolution) smartphone subscribers, according to a new study by TeleGeography. Although, it really shouldn't come as much of a surprise, given that the first inaugural wave of LTE 4G deployments took place right here in the U.S. What's more of a surprise is that the report also revealed that North America’s lead in LTE smartphone subscribers will facing much stiff competition in the way of Asia, as they ramp up their own LTE activity. Let the LTE games begin.

Reports from Bloomberg have come in that auction house Sotheby's is gearing up to auction off the original three-page contract among Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ron Wayne that established Apple Computer Co. on April 1st, 1976. The document, which will be one of Sotheby's highlights, is expected to hit the auction block in New York City next month for December 13th and predicted to fetch $100,000 up to $150,000 in auction. Now this is a three page document worth bidding for, in all its historical, societal and sentimental value.

The folks at Seagate have announced the 3rd generation unit in their Momentus solid state hybrid drive line, here in the Momentus XT 750GB - as large as an HDD and as fast as an SSD, and at one tenth the price. This newest unit comes with 750GB of space, SLC NAND at 8GB, and a SATA 6GB/s NCQ interface. This newest drive has 50% more capacity than the previous generation Seagate Momentus, is 1.5x faster, and has both double the NAND flash and double the interface speed of its predecessor. Though it has the same name as its 500GB older sibling, this newest generation hybrid drive acts as the new plateau for Seagate and is available at a handful of online retailers today.